alt Hacker NewsShow HN: 6cy – Experimental streaming archive format with per-block codecs
Hi HN,
I’ve been experimenting with archive format design and built 6cy as a research project.
The goal is not to replace zip/7z, but to explore: • block-level codec polymorphism (different compression per block) • streaming-first layout (no global seek required) • better crash recovery characteristics • plugin-based architecture so proprietary codecs can exist without changing the format
Right now this is an experimental v0.x format. The specification may still change and compatibility is not guaranteed yet.
I’m mainly looking for feedback on the format design rather than performance comparisons.
Thanks for taking a look.
Comments
itsthecourier • today at 6:01 PM
sounds great, may you please share some benchmarks/experiments?
➕ show 1 reply
Looks pretty cool. After checking out spec.md, one thing I might suggest is using UUIDs for external codec ids. There's a lot of codecs/formats out there, and limiting to a u8 might lead to collisions.
It might also be nice to provide a mechanism to advertise the required codecs toward the beginning of the stream, in case the consumer does not have the necessary codecs and wishes to abort the transfer.